Personal Development

Success is an elusive thing that almost all of us are chasing. Some spend their life not finding it, some find it when they feel it is just not worth getting it, and then there are those few lucky souls who do find it. Sometimes even after finding it people realize that it is not what will truly make them happy and then another quest for elusive “Success” begins.

Strange as it may seem, but we have a mysterious attraction to make things complicated when they can be very simple. This is so true in life that those who realize this after years of struggle find themselves astonished at how they got caught in the web of doubts, confusion and struggle that they themselves had woven.

Today we will talk about 2 simple techniques of Mastering Success and surfing through the waves of challenges like an efficient surfer. Must make some points clear – simple and easy are not the same things.

Mastering Success Formula #1

Crazy About Measurable “Result”

Quickest, fastest way to progress in life is to fall in love with “Results”. I struggled with this idea when it was introduced to me by one of the very interesting person I interacted with for about an hour’s time. His ideas seemed so simple when I heard it while attending an open forum at Mphasis that I took an immediate liking to everything he said. He simply said – “Become indispensable for you team.” Well, thinking back I was amazed how our mind misses some powerful ideas which are as simple as this. Simple yet not easy – I must point out. But only if you move in the right direction will you reach the intended destination, isn’t it? Sometimes we keep moving in the wrong direction and keep complaining about not being able to find our destination.

Another important thing is to make sure that these results are measurable and not something we will struggle to explain to others. It should be measurable so that anyone can see the obvious value addition it brings to your team or organization.

So, before we move to next point let us reiterate the two key things that we talked about:

Get crazy about results

Not just any results but measurable results which brings visible changes to your team or organization

(The “how-to” to get results will fall in place only after some time and it may not be easy. However, it is the only question you should try to find an answer to)

Master Success Formula #2

Give Your Brain Input That Produces The Desired Output

One of the biggest mistakes that we human do is that we sometimes start acting as if we are more powerful than nature. You can see the results everywhere around. Pollution, global warming, depletion of ozone layer etc. it is all because we act as if we are bigger than nature. Fighting nature is a recipe of disaster.

You must be wondering how that is connected to our personal success. Well, it is. It is most certainly related to our personal success. I would blame our education system for this. How? This is how –

Our brain’s power lies in the power of focus. If we do not use this power of focus in the right way then instead of growing our brain becomes increasingly less productive and slowly it starts negatively affecting us in many ways.

Let us look at how can we nurture the power of our brain and use it to help us master success. You can put this idea in practice right now.

Take a few minutes out and jot down 3 key areas of your life that you would like to bring a turnaround to. It could be job, family and personal health. Take a post-it pad and write these down and stick it somewhere in your room.

Keep asking yourself for the next few days whether bringing absolutely powerful changes in these areas will really make you the happiest person that you ever wanted to become. (Please ask the same question and do not make changes, it is framed in this manner specifically because it activates our brain in a certain way which is important). If you do find some other areas bring it in and remove the one that you don’t think is that important and follow the same exercise. This question asking exercise is best to be done early morning or before going to bed at a quite time.

Once you are done with this exercise for 5-7 days and you feel you have clarity, now you can do the real job of filling most of your day’s time thinking, contemplating and reflecting on thoughts directed in these areas. Take it to a very micro level, browse, talk and do almost everything where you are discussing or exploring about these ideas.

They say only power that we have is the power to choose. And there is no denying in the fact that this is what makes our lives the fun ride that it turns out to be. Otherwise what is the fun in being a powerless soul wandering and acting as nature demands us to.

It is no doubt that the quality of our lives is decided by the decisions that we make. The life that we have been living has been shaped by the decisions that we have made in the past. But the good news is that we can choose to behave and act differently today to change the course of direction that our tomorrows take.

So is there is a simple way to simplify our decision making mechanism. Of course, we all have an unknown, invisible decision making mechanism. For most of us it is unknown. It will be good to know what is this mechanism that actually takes the decisions for us. What are the steps we go through to arrive at all sorts of decisions – from trivial to the most valuable ones.

The simplest tool that helps each one of us to arrive at making decisions is called priority. Do you know what is the most important task for you today? Also, how do you decide what is important task for you?

Until we are clear our mind about our priority list, life will be a painful and pointless task with us stumbling from one day to another without making any headway .

Few things that we can do:

Decide your most important goal that you want to achieve in the coming time (e.g. 1-2 year’s time)

Decide a list of activities that will lead you to your goal. (You can create a fish bone model)

Work out the list and put these tasks in order of priority

Every night before going to bed you should know what is going to be the most important task that you need to focus on

Be ready with a contingency plan e.g. what is plan b if plan a fails.

Put a time line to every activity

Assign a time to every activity depending on the relevance of task

Just setting a goal may not help; you need to set some tempting milestones

If you want to be lead a life like a true champion, you will have to be absolutely sure of your values. Let me ask you this? Where did you get your values from? Most of us do not consciously choose our values. We borrow it from people who we spend time with. It is your family, teachers and a lot of others we spend a lot of time with during the early days. However, once something becomes your values it starts guiding your life like the sail of a ship. Do you know – All the decisions that you take are guided by your values.

What are values?

Values, in simple words are what we consider as valuable or important. It could be ideas, principles, things (e.g. money) etc.

Let us say you want to change your job. How does your value affect this decision? If you consider money as your topmost value or most valuable thing at that time, then you may leave the old organization for the new without much hassle. However, what if relationship is most important for you; in this case relationship with your manager or your boss? Will it not create a kind of catch-22 situation for you? Consider this, you are from an extremely rich family and work for fun and spend quality time with friends and colleagues. Would you value money as much as someone who works to make ends meet? Now situation has changed and for this person who may not need money as much as the other person taking decision will not be as difficult. He will let go of the other job as he does not value money as much as the other.

However, as we all know values guide our lives but are not consciously picked by us. And here lies the problem. They are a result of unconscious choices which we made. It is therefore very important for everyone who wants to lead a more aware and matured life to question their values before life throws a question at them.ACTION EXERCISE:

Sit down and write your top 5 values

Figure out where did you pick it from? – (was it from an optimist or from a loser)

Where these values could possibly be taking you?

Question your values. Try and find out why should you or why should you not have some values in your list – This will make you crystal clear about questions that life could possibly be throwing at you if not now, may be later.

It is great to be a man of clarity than to be a muddle head. As a leader (and anyone who leads his life is a leader rest are stumbling from one day to another) you are expected to be a man of clarity of vision, values and only then you deliver whole-hearted action. As you all know actions create your destiny.

Sit down and do the exercise above. You could be doing that man a great service who looks at you for everything, the man who could not live without your support, the man who is the center of your universe. I am sure you know who that man is – yes it is YOU.

If you can constantly teach people how to do better in life; you have successfully created a huge queue of long-term if not life-long followers. That is what true leaders successfully do.

“People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
Most of the trainings that happens does not truly deal with issues that the people, who are being trained, are bothered about, but they deal with issues that organization is bothered about. Hence the disconnect. Can this be smartly aligned? Is there a way to create this sort of alignment? Human behavioral factors provide a solution to this. And if this can be done, real communication begins; and trainings happen only when that deep communication link is created. Our audience is always asking the basic question to trainers and their bosses, “Do you care about me or do you care about your profits?” And because they fail to get a,”Yes, we care about You,” response they are not really ‘present’ and engrossed in the training programs being offered.

Chat With Your Trainer

Harsh Bhushan

Know Your Trainer

I train, coach and mentor clients with 5 – 15 years experience. I work with people on:

• Delivering Power Presentation

• Communication to Influence

• Producing Giant Results

• One-to-One Coaching (on request)

I have trained and coached people for past 8 years. After working for so long I have noticed how people fail to do justice to their skills, talents and desires and oftentimes instead choose to learn to live with their limitations that they accept as their identity because of their lack of awareness.

When people work hard for years to achieve their dreams only to discover that apart form their functional knowledge they will require behavioral skills and personal management to actually push forward their success story then they lose confidence and lose sight of their true desires.

I have developed special training programs custom designed for people including corporate employees and entrepreneurs with 5 – 15 year’s experience to vastly improve their personal effectiveness, boost their image, confidence and push their communication and influence to an absolute new level.